I haven’t read Maupassant’s Une vie, but Alexandre Astruc’s film adaptation of it, provocatively retitled End of Desire in the U.S., is an exquisite though exceedingly strange fusion of Brontë (either Emily or Charlotte) and the gathering nouvelle vague in French cinema. Perhaps “fusion” is the wrong word, for the Gothic and contemporary (that is, […]

Boris Banet began by making silent films, and the prologue of Odnazhdy Nochyu (alternately called in English Once at Night and Dark Is the Night), a wartime sound film, is mysteriously, frighteningly silent: at night, the shooting down of a Soviet plane, and a family’s rescue of two  soldiers: a gripping, powerful glimpse of the […]